More from the Eulogy

Toward the end of the eulogy, I said that I learned a lot from Asher, and that possibly the most important thing I learned was that when a person doesn't fit into frameworks, maybe the frameworks are wrong, not the person.
Every child teaches his or her parents how to be a parent for that specific child. There is no such thing as "father" and "mother" and "son" in the abstract sense. There are a couple of billion individual fathers, mothers, and sons, and each of them is unique. It took me a long time to learn how to be Asher's father - I'm not sure that I ever truly learned, but even though he's no longer alive, I can keep trying to learn.
I always adapted well to frameworks, until I finished university and had to step out of academic frameworks into real life. At that point I discovered that I couldn't cope with bureaucracies, which is why I've been self-employed for more than twenty-five years. It was difficult for me to have a son who never fit into schools. I wasn't brought up to question institutions, and I didn't go off to battle them on Asher's behalf when he got in trouble. Perhaps I should have. I always thought he should have been more adaptable, that he should have behaved better. Perhaps he should have.
But looking back on things, I wouldn't have wanted to have Asher any other way. If the schools couldn't accommodate a bright, talented, creative person like him, there was something deeply wrong with the schools. If his teachers were threatened by his originality and intensity, that shows their inadequacy as teachers.
We received a wonderful letter from a remarkable woman who was the principal of his school for a year, who remembered Asher's intense honesty and integrity with respect, even gratitude. If he had had more teachers like that, he would have fit in better.